Charles Crichton (1954)

In October 1952, Life magazine published a piece entitled ‘The Story of Two Mothers’[1].   This told of how a Yugoslav woman, Pavla Pirecnik, was, in 1941, widowed when the Nazis shot dead her Partisan husband and parted from her baby son, Ivan.  She survived the next few years in concentration camps and learned in 1950 that her child was still alive.  In 1943, two-and-a-half-year-old Ivan Pirecnik had been adopted, from a Leipzig orphanage, by Josefine and Gustav Sirsch, a childless German couple living in the Sudetenland.  The Sirschs were told by the orphanage authorities that Ivan was the ‘son of Volkdeutsche murdered by Yugoslav partisans’.  They renamed the boy Dieter.  Gustav Sirsch, an SS trooper, returned to action and, at the end of the war, was sent to a Soviet prison camp, where he remained until 1948.   The couple learned in early 1951 Dieter’s true identity and that his birth mother wanted him back.  A US occupation court ruled some eighteen months later on the custody of the child:  Ivan/Dieter was to be returned to Pavla Pirecnik.

The coverage in Life included many powerful pictures of those involved – family album snapshots and photographs taken under the pressure of the court hearings (of which there were several) and in their aftermath.  The story gained international attention and led to the Ealing drama The Divided Heart, released in Britain in November 1954.   In his excellent introduction to the film’s BFI screening, Nigel Algar noted that, so great was the public interest at the time of its release, the Daily Sketch invited its readers to write in with their own verdicts on whether the child should live with his biological mother or his adoptive parents.  (Algar didn’t say what the resulting vote was.)   The Divided Heart isn’t the equal of an earlier film on a not dissimilar theme, Fred Zinnemann’s The Search, but it was very well received in the 1950s (it won three BAFTAs in 1955) and it’s well worth seeing sixty years on.

The early scenes leave something to be desired.  Perhaps because Charles Crichton and the screenwriter Jack Whittingham (with input from Richard Hughes) are so focused on, and confident of the strength of, the real-life story they’re telling, their description of the home life of the German family in the Bavarian Alps is perfunctory.  The ten-year-old Toni Hartl (as Dieter Sirsch has been renamed) is mad about skiing and we see him preparing for a local competition.  He wins it but is robbed of any pleasure in the victory by the absence of his parents on the big day.  When they return that evening, they explain that, unexpectedly, they had to be in Munich, a visit necessitated by the impending legal proceedings around Toni’s future custody.  What’s so unconvincing about this scene is that they don’t even ask the visibly upset child how he did in the skiing competition; it’s as if the film-makers, rather than the parents, have more important things on their mind.  As the horror of the Hartls’ predicament grows, you don’t get enough sense of their outrage at the lie the orphanage told them.  The script always refers to Inga and Franz, as they’re called in the film, as ‘foster’ (never as ‘adoptive’) parents but surely they had good reason to think their relationship with Toni was more binding than that?  (Their belief that Toni is German blinds them to the significance of the child’s fear of Franz’s SS uniform.)  All in all, the roles of Inga and Franz are underwritten:  the couple say nothing to each other about whether or not they can have children of their own.  For the first half hour of The Divided Heart, I thought it was going to turn out to be remarkable less for its intrinsic quality than for its historical interest, including the notably sympathetic presentation of a German couple, with the husband an ex-Nazi soldier, in a British film made less than ten years after the end of World War II.

Relatively little is seen of the Yugoslavian woman, renamed Sonja Slavko, before the extended flashbacks to both mothers’ wartime experiences – Sonja’s separation from Ivan and from his two older sisters (whom Sonja never sees again), Inga’s adopting him.  These episodes are stronger than what’s gone before.  Perhaps it was an accident that, as Sonja’s husband disappears up the street of their town, surrounded by German soldiers, a lone pigeon wandered across shot in the opposite direction – but, if so, Charles Crichton was right to keep the bird in:  the effect certainly intensifies the sense of the woman’s desolating loss.  The children playing the two contrasting little boys in the German orphanage – the jolly, extrovert Hans and the melancholy, withdrawn Toni, whom Inga and Franz nevertheless choose in favour of Hans – are very well directed by Crichton.   Hans is played by Martin Stephens, best known as Miles in The Innocents but who shows here too what an exceptional child actor he was.  Martin Keller as the infant Toni provides a bridge to the subsequent scenes in which the ten-year-old boy played by Michel Ray appears and helps make these more effective.  Ray, although magnetically odd throughout, doesn’t always impress in his early scenes but he’s good when Toni is drawing in class at school or concentrating on a game at home with added intensity in order to ignore what’s going on between his parents and the authorities.  (Nigel Algar noted that Michel Ray got the part largely because Michael Balcon knew his parents and that the kid could ski.)

From the point at which the court hearing begins, the dramatic structure of The Divided Heart is unsurprising – which way the court ruling looks set to go keeps changing – but the actresses playing Inga and Sonja, and Michel Ray, who conveys Toni’s increasing realisation that there can’t be a simple, happy solution, make the story compelling. Cornell Borchers as Inga has the disadvantage, at this distance in time, of resembling various stars past and present – Ingrid Bergman, Doris Day, Annette Bening – without being as strong a presence as any of them.  Borchers doesn’t suggest much range and the script makes Inga less understanding of Sonja’s position than vice versa but these two features combine to work well.  Borchers’s Inga, as soon as she finds out Toni’s true identity, is immediately despairing that she’ll lose him.  The relentlessness of her pessimism has accumulating impact.  It also makes for a strong contrast with the more vital woman whom we see in the wartime scenes between Inga and her newly adopted child.  As Sonja, Yvonne Mitchell gives a remarkable performance.  Nearly all her lines are in Slovene.  She learned the lines phonetically yet the depth and guttural quality of her voice sounds, to my inexpert ear anyway, genuine and her readings are emotionally expressive.  It’s frustrating that Charles Crichton is inconsistent in how he has Sonja react to what she hears in English or German (pretty well the same thing, in the context of the film).  There are moments, even before she’s begun to learn the new language in order to talk to her son, where Sonja appears to understand what’s been said but, in the courtroom sequences, Crichton occasionally has a translator whisper Slovene to her, which suggests that Sonja is uncomprehending of German/English the rest of the time.  I’d have liked to have seen Yvonne Mitchell given the chance to respond, in what’s already an extremely stressful situation, to translation coming at her thick and fast in the courtroom.  Mitchell is very good at getting across the idea that finding her ten-year-old son, although wonderful for Sonja, makes her realise too that she’ll never get back the baby she lost.

From an early stage, Jack Whittingham tends to have characters make sententious statements about war and he really lets rip in the court’s final summing up.  It’s not implausible to have the trio of judges expatiate in this way but they’re stiffly played, especially by Liam Redmond and Eddie Byrne:  I don’t normally care for Alexander Knox but he’s by some way the best of the three.  The final scenes of The Divided Heart are consistently persuasive, however.  When Ivan/Toni leaves Inga and Franz, it’s powerful.  Their neighbours gather and a photographer takes a picture of the bereft couple; you see how this private grief has become a matter of public interest.  The final sequence in the train carrying the boy and Sonja back to Yugoslavia is particularly impressive.  The last of the judges to pronounce has spoken of how Ivan/Toni, thanks to the upbringing that Inga and Franz have given him, will be well equipped to take care of Sonja in time.  When a ticket inspector arrives in their compartment, her continuing lack of language skills means the boy has to start taking charge immediately.  There’s something hard, almost unpleasant in this – Michel Ray’s attitude suggests that Ivan knows he’ll have a lot on his plate with this rather simple woman but that he’ll do the necessary.   Another startling moment from earlier in the film:  is it intentional that the reaction of the Bavarian schoolkids when Sonja visits is more unpleasantly aggressive than would be explained by mere suspicion of a stranger in their midst?   It’s hard not to find in this an unpleasant echo of how the German people were successfully encouraged to see ‘aliens’ all around them during the Nazi regime.  Georges Auric’s rich but sensitive music supports the action effectively.  The cast also includes Armin Dahlen as Franz and Geoffrey Keen, solid as always, as the British official who co-ordinates the negotiations between the boys’ parents and the authorities.

Postscript   The longevity of the actors playing the adoptive parents and the afterlife of Michel Ray are worth remarking.  As Nigel Algar mentioned, Cornell Borchers died just last month at the age of eighty-nine.  Armin Dahlen will be ninety-five later this year.  After appearing in Lawrence of Arabia, Michel Ray – real name Michel de Carvalho – abandoned an acting career for one in investment banking.  He married the heiress Charlene Heineken and is now a billionaire.  The winter sports ability that helped him get cast in the film didn’t desert him:  he was a triple Winter Olympian in luge – at Grenoble (1968), Sapporo (1972) and Innsbruck (1976).  He’s currently President of British Skeleton, the event in which Britain has won gold in each of the last two Winter Olympics.

4 June 2014

[1] http://tinyurl.com/por7yq4